Two Truths and a Lie (Ellen McGarrahan)

P 4 No One Is Going to Talk to You ine trees, a green car, a white sky. Blood. It’s the morning after my conversation with Marianne. I am at the dining room table again, next to the pile of Jesse’s letters. I am not reading the letters. I’m staring at my husband’s computer. On the screen is Friday, February 20, 1976. The day exactly. The sunlight and shadows of that morning, flickering. Look, there’s the Camaro. Dusty, dirty. There’s Constable Irwin, on the ground, under a yellow tarp. Trooper Black has been taken away in an ambulance, but his cream Stetson is still where it fell, right by the Camaro’s front tire—next to a small shiny gun. And blood. So much blood. Bright red and so thick, like paste. A thick bright red pool at the driver’s-side door. “How did you find this?” I ask Peter. Peter shrugs. He searched the video collection of Miami Dade College. The Wolfson Archives. Newsreels. “But I’ve never seen it before,” I say, almost in protest. It’s been all around me in the ether this whole time. I hit pause, rewind, and watch it again. My stomach feels like it is filled with burning cement. And again. And again. I’m looking for the truck drivers, to see if they’re on this tape too. Their statements are in the case file at the courthouse: the eyewitnesses. •

At the rest area, it’s close to seven-thirty in the morning now. Mist covers the ground still, shrouding the cars and the spindly pines. At the south end of the lot, a truck driver is pulling in to check the lights on his tractor-trailer. Pierce Hyman is fifty years old, from Jacksonville, Florida. He’s working for Pilot Freight. As he brings his big rig to a halt, Hyman can see a Camaro and a Florida Highway Patrol cruiser parked side by side, up at the north end of the lot, near the entrance ramp that leads back onto the interstate. There’s some action going on up there. Hyman sees Trooper Phillip Black standing at the open door on the driver’s side of the Camaro, bending forward, looking inside the car. There’s a man in a brown jacket sitting in the driver’s seat of the Camaro. That is Jesse Tafero. Another man stands outside the Camaro at the front of the cars. Walter Rhodes. Now Hyman watches as Trooper Black straightens up and walks over to his FHP cruiser. Black is at the cruiser for a couple of minutes, on the radio. Then Black walks back toward the Camaro. As Black approaches, Jesse stands up from the driver’s seat and gets out of the Camaro. A sudden scuffle. Black grabs Jesse. Constable Donald Irwin steps in to help. Black and Irwin have Jesse pressed up against the cruiser; they are trying to restrain him. Now Black is backing off and drawing his gun. When Black does that, Hyman sees Walter Rhodes, up at the front of the cars, “put his hands in the air.” Then: The trooper was standing at about the door of the Camaro. The shots appeared to come out of the back of the car, through the left side….I heard the patrolman say “Oh my God, I’ve been shot.” Pierce Hyman is not the only independent eyewitness to the murders. Truck driver Robert McKenzie sees them too. McKenzie is thirty-two and driving for Food Fair, in Miami. He’s in the rest area on his morning coffee break, in the cab of his tractor-trailer rig. Through the mist, up ahead, McKenzie can just make out the cruiser parked next to the beat-up Camaro. He sees Trooper Black standing at the door of the Camaro, talking to Jesse, who is sitting in the driver’s seat, sideways, with one foot on the ground. He sees Walter outside the car, walking around. Now Trooper Black is bending down to look inside the Camaro. Black stays like that for a while.

McKenzie thinks the trooper must be talking to someone in the backseat of the car. McKenzie’s coffee break is over. Still watching, McKenzie puts his truck in gear and starts easing toward the highway entrance ramp. The route takes him close to the Camaro. There’s Trooper Black, stepping in toward Jesse to frisk him. Jesse, jumping backwards. Constable Irwin stepping to assist. The two officers push Jesse up against the cruiser. Now Black is backing off and drawing his gun. Black points his weapon directly at Walter Rhodes. Walter puts his hands up in the air. “The guy reached his hands up,” McKenzie says. Then: I heard five shots. And the officer fell instant, and then the other guy fell right behind the officer. McKenzie cannot see who fires the gun. But he is watching Jesse and Walter as the shots go off. They are both standing outside the Camaro. Neither one of them has a gun. “You could see them clear?” a detective asks McKenzie. “Could see them clear,” McKenzie replies. Right before he hears the shots, McKenzie sees someone sitting in the backseat of the Camaro. Directly behind the driver’s seat, immediately inside the open door of the car, just a few feet away from Trooper Black. A person with “long, light, light brown, sandy hair.” A woman. • “Sometimes things happen that you have no control over in life, and this was one of them. I was there in the car with my children, in the backseat, and it never occurred to me that I would ever be accused,” Sunny told 20/20, in 1992. “I was a vegetarian, I wouldn’t have killed a fly,” she told the BBC in 2007. “I was a peace and love vegetarian. Violence was anathema to my life,” Sunny wrote.

That last quote is from a book Sunny wrote about her case. I have it with me in my car. It’s afternoon now and I am threading my way through a lost corner of tiny Dania Beach, Florida, a stitch of crabgrass just south of the Fort Lauderdale airport, looking for an address. Sunny’s book is called Stolen Time. The front cover describes it as “the inspiring story of an innocent woman condemned to death.” It quotes my Miami Herald story about Jesse’s execution on page 490. “A remarkable book,” the Daily Mail, a British newspaper—circulation 1.16 million—calls it, according to a blurb on the front cover. “An extraordinary and inspirational story,” says the actor Susan Sarandon, in red ink on the back cover. Sarandon played Sunny in the movie version of The Exonerated, released in 2005. “Sunny Jacobs is a remarkable woman.” But people who knew Sunny Jacobs back in the day seem to have a different take. Marianne, the Playboy Bunny, for one. Marianne knew Jesse before he and Sunny got together, and she knew them as a couple too. “I don’t think any of this would ever have happened if it hadn’t been for Sunny,” Marianne told Jesse’s lawyers. Marianne thought Sunny was “a complete sociopath,” a weapons-obsessed rich girl with millionaire parents and a fascination with machine-gun-toting heiress Patty Hearst. Guns excited Sunny, Marianne said. Guns thrilled her. When I asked Marianne who she thought was responsible for the murders, Marianne did not hesitate. “I think Sunny did it. I believe the truck drivers.” “The truck drivers?” “Yes. The ones who saw Jesse bent over the police car during the shooting. I believe them.” A cold, controlling “princess” who was “into gun warfare.” That’s how Marianne described Sunny in the affidavit she gave Jesse’s attorneys in 1989. “She thought she was Bonnie and Clyde….That’s why I’ll never believe it was Jesse who shot those cops.” “Sunny was crazy,” Jesse’s mother, Kay Tafero, said in her statement. “Sunny was always the leader in that relationship—Jesse just went along with what Sunny wanted.”

• Kay and Marianne. The Welsh matron and the Playboy bombshell—they were friends. They went to church together and said novenas for Jesse and rode up together to death row. “She was a real lady,” Marianne told me, about Kay. Wistfully. This morning, after watching the newsreels on Peter’s laptop, I continued my searches about Marianne and her friends. One thing I found was a report in the National Archives with a very dry title: Organized Criminal Activities: Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs. A U.S. Senate investigation into organized crime in South Florida—“loansharking, narcotics trafficking, arson, and murder”—in the 1960s and 1970s. The investigation included a long run of sworn testimony about a drug gang involved in “incredible violence,” according to then-senator Sam Nunn. Marianne is mentioned by name in the transcript. Murders. Extortions. A nightclub owner car-bombed over a bar tab. Men forced to dig their own graves in the Everglades. Men tied up in curtain cords and bedsheets, jammed into bathtubs, interrogated, and shot dead. The leader of the gang was a man named Ricky Cravero who, along with his high school friend Ronnie and their pals Stanley and Bobby and Billy the Kid, brought millions of dollars of cocaine and marijuana into South Florida. On Valentine’s Day in 1974, a rivalry among Cravero’s gang members ended in gunfire in the parking lot of the Pirate’s Cove bar in North Miami Beach when Stanley—dressed up for a night out in a maroon slacks and sweater set—stepped out of his Lincoln Continental Mark IV to find his friends brandishing a sawed-off carbine and a .32 pistol with a silencer. “What is up, fellows?” Stanley asked. “This, Stanley,” his friends replied, blasting him twenty-three times. “He sure looked funny,” Cravero later said, laughing. The initial idea had been to kill Stanley in Billy’s apartment, but they worried about blood getting on the velvet couches and shag carpet in the living room. And on the lion-skin rug in the bedroom. When police searched the call records for Stanley’s home telephone, they found Jesse Tafero’s name.

So now I’m wondering. How does a hippie peace-and-love vegetarian rich kid end up asleep in a beat-up Camaro with her two young children, a guy on parole with a gun, and a boyfriend on the call list of the most dangerous drug gangsters in South Florida? • Sonia Jacobs, also known as Sonia Leigh Linder, Sonia Lee Jacobs, Sonia Lee Jacobs Linder. Born in August 1947 to Herbert and Bella Jacobs, prosperous owners of a textile firm. Sunny grew up in a leafy Long Island suburb with her younger brother, Alan. In school, she was vice president of the student council, according to her book. In 1965, when she was in college, Sunny found out she was pregnant. She dropped out and got married, with a wedding reception at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. But the marriage didn’t last, and by 1968 Sunny and her young son were in Miami, living in “a nice house” owned by Sunny’s parents. Sunny “backed off from achievement,” her mother later said, but doesn’t “have a mean bone in her body.” Interviewed by a court officer as part of a pre-sentence investigation after the murders, Sunny said that she only rarely drank alcohol and that while she occasionally smoked marijuana, she was “very anti-drugs.” Her parents were convinced of her innocence. It was simply a matter of the “wrong time, wrong place, wrong people,” her mother told the investigators. In 1982, when Sunny was still in prison, her parents died in an airplane crash. New Orleans, Pan Am, takeoff, thunderstorm. “They cannot be dead. They will be found alive somewhere…my mommy and daddy,” Sunny wrote in her book, about the moment she heard the news. “This is the saddest day of my life,” she wrote to Jesse that afternoon. The value of Herb and Bella’s estate in today’s dollars was more than $4 million, including a payment from the airline’s insurance company. The old newsreels I watched this morning had footage of Sunny. On her way into the courtroom for her trial in 1976, shoulders back, gaze steady, chin up. Prim in a light blue suit, smoking a cigarette, handcuffed. Coming around a corner in the courthouse, she arches one eyebrow at the camera,

halfway between a wink and a smile. Asked about Sunny, the mother of one of her ex-boyfriends said, “She thought she was God’s gift to men.” • That last statement is why I am now standing in front of a tumbledown apartment building just off Dixie Highway here in Dania Beach, in the rain. In her book, Stolen Time, Sunny wrote about the life she was leading before she met Jesse. At the time, she wrote, she was in a “long-term, monogamous relationship” with her boyfriend John, “a laid-back kind of guy”: We had a house in North Miami surrounded by tree nurseries. I called it the Ranch. It was a sweet old house with a stream running behind it and a family of ducks that would come to the door for their daily feed of dried corn. You could walk outside and collect your breakfast of oranges, grapefruits, bananas and coconuts fresh from the trees in the morning. It was a kind and gentle way of life. One day, a buddy of John’s dropped by for a visit and brought his friend Jesse. Sparks flew. “Jesse was the most fascinating human being I had ever met. And he was so beautiful to look at—the way he moved, the way he’d drape himself into a chair.” Soon, Sunny and John were history and Sunny’s young son, Eric, “was already calling Jesse ‘Dad.’ ” I have not been able to find John, but I’m pretty sure I have found his mother, because a woman named Marion Mulcahy—in this building I am now standing in front of—gave an affidavit to Jesse’s attorneys in which she said her son John lived with Sunny in the early 1970s, and that John and Jesse were good friends. Marion’s affidavit does not mention any fruit trees: John lived with Sonia Jacobs—we called her Sunny—for about two years….Their whole life revolved around drugs. She was even more involved in them than he….Sunny set her sights on Jesse and went after him full force. It was the same thing as with John—drugs, drugs, and more drugs….All of this is so tragic. I mean, if it hadn’t

been for Sunny this never would have happened. She is a sick, evil person. She’ll tell you anything you want to hear as long as it gets her what she wants. In my detective work, I have always promised myself that if I ever have serious misgivings—a feeling, intuition, whatever—I will not knock on the door. I’ve only had to invoke it once—in North Carolina, at dusk, at the door of a shack down a gully, on a case where I had to find a guy and ask him if he’d raped his girlfriend. Today, my initial impression of this apartment building here in Dania Beach has been a similar feeling of Oh shit. But now I decide I’m just nervous. Because if Marion does not talk to me, I have no backup plan. I know who Sunny says she is now. But there’s no one else to talk to about who Sunny Jacobs was that morning at the rest stop almost forty years ago. The apartment building is a duplex, side by side, two doors facing the street. A cigarette burns unattended in an ashtray by the door on the right. I knock. No answer. I peek through the open window. No one around. I walk over to the other apartment. I’m about to knock there when a rough voice startles me from inside. “What are you doing?” a man says. Big guy, barrel-chested, gray hair, gray beard. One of his eyes seems injured. Thick white flesh creeping over the iris. He is wearing a T-shirt with the word irish on it. He does not open the screen door. He does not look friendly. “I’m sorry, is Marion here?” “Who are you?” the guy in the irish T-shirt says. “I witnessed Jesse Tafero’s execution.” “You’re asking about my mother,” he says. “She’s ill. She’s not going to talk to you.” “Actually, I’m hoping to speak with John,” I say. “Is he around?” “My brother?” he says. “My brother?” “Well, Sunny wrote about—” “My brother John is dead,” Irish says.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” I say. Instantly. “I didn’t know. I’m really sorry.” “My brother was shot in the head,” Irish says. Opening the screen door now and taking two steps toward me. He’s large. “You’re trying to find out the reason for what happened to Jesse and Sunny? There will never be a reason. Just like there will never be a reason for what happened to my brother. There could never be a reason for that, either.” “I’m not looking for a reason,” I say. “I just want to know what happened.” “You will never know.” “I need to know,” I tell him. “Look, I could talk to you—I was around then, I knew them—but I’m not going to. Nobody from the old days will. People have put this to rest. Nobody wants to dig it all back up. For what. For you? No way. What you’re doing is pointless and hurtful. You’re going to have to figure out a way to just live with it.” “Yes, well, I’ve tried that. And obviously I’ve failed because here I am on your porch.” We stare at each other. A moan from the shadows of the apartment. Frail, hollow. “Be right there, Ma,” he says, turning away. The door slams behind him. He does not come back.

I 5 A Squealer, a Liar, and a Mute am shaking as I walk back across Irish’s shitty lawn to my car. What you’re doing is pointless and hurtful. Nobody is going to talk to you. Standing there on his porch with his damaged eye, its pupil diamondshaped, glaring, fixed. With the sour smell of beer and the damp ash of burned-off cigarettes, and the rain. I feel a stinging inside my rib cage and my throat, trapped, toxic. Like I have swallowed live hornets. A mixture of shame and fury. But whatever, I think, as I slam the car into gear. This is not the first time I’ve been told to drop dead. It happens. Those two retired FBI guys in Dallas on that stock fraud case, back when I was just starting out. With their aviator sunglasses and Southern drawls, they’d straight-up called me a slut. How do we know you won’t go upstairs with the next guy who buys you a drink and tell him everything we’ve told you here? I burst into tears right in front of them. Pillow talk, they’d mocked me. She sure looks like a pillow talker to me. That old grizzled cowboy roaring No no no as I asked his daughter about the heroin ring she’d been operating out of a San Luis Obispo surf shop. The secret lover of a murdered San Francisco tattoo artist, storming around his echoing loft as the night fell outside, accusing me of not caring about his pain. I had cared about his pain, actually. I just had no power to make it go away. My boss had warned me that getting yelled at came with the job. His advice: Don’t take it personally.

But this is personal. That’s the problem. All the times I’ve been yelled at before, it’s been for the job. The boss, the client, the case. Now it feels like I’ve crossed a raw, exposed line. That guy Irish was yelling at me. The thing is, in my own life, I’m terrible at cocktail parties, terrible at chatting, terrible at knowing what to wear and what to do with my hair. It’s only as a private detective that I can do this thing where I appear on your doorstep and you invite me inside. It’s an alchemy I don’t fully comprehend. Usually people talk. I didn’t understand why until my friend and fellow private eye Jacqueline asked me a question. Isn’t there anything or anyone you’d talk about, if someone came to your door? I thought about it. The guy who robbed me at knifepoint outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I was in high school. Him. The guy who slapped me across the face on a Lexington Avenue bus after a tiny piece of paper I tossed out the window— I was in the seventh grade—accidentally bounced off his sister. Everyone frozen, staring, as he raised his hand high and slammed it down into my cheekbone. Him. The elderly janitor at the New York Society Library who lunged lips-first at me in that rickety cage of an elevator—absolutely, him too. The chapped old rat. Jacqueline nodded, and suddenly I got it. There is an incredible healing value to saying out loud what you know to be true to someone who is listening, who understands, and who might be able to help. All of which makes me wonder now about this pal of Sunny’s. Irish hadn’t said thanks but no thanks. He’d told me to go straight to hell. Exactly as if he was afraid of something I might find out. But here’s a fact I did not mention to Irish, back there on his front porch: You can patronize me, scold me, lie to my face, and I’ll roll with it. But flat out telling me no? That word is a red cape in a bullring to me. Not sure why. Always been true. • In the morning, I call the Broward County State Attorney’s Office. If Irish is right that nobody is going to talk to me, then I am going to need to find every piece of paper there is on this case. I already have the case documents from the Broward County Circuit Court, but I’m sure those exploded old onionskin files are not the whole story. I want the records that the prosecutor gathered—the investigation papers, the trial files. Getting an

answer from the State Attorney’s Office, though, is turning out to be much more difficult than I’d thought. This feels like my tenth phone call over there. It should be so straightforward. Florida has an ironclad public records law. I remember that from my days here as a newspaper reporter. Ask for the files, get the files. Not this endless back-and-forth. Is it because the prosecutor now is the same person who was the prosecutor then? It’s incredible, but the current Broward County state attorney, Michael J. Satz, is the lawman who back in 1976 put Jesse and Sunny on trial for their lives, with soon-to-recant Walter Norman Rhodes Jr. as the star witness. When Satz tried the case, he was an assistant in the office, but days after Sunny was convicted, Satz announced that he was going to run for the top job. He was elected in a landslide and he’s been in office ever since. Thirty-eight years, eleven months, and six days, as of today. He has not spoken publicly about the case in many years. I am going to have to get him, somehow, to talk to me. As I listen to the office’s phone ring and ring, I realize that another question has been forming in the back of my mind. The truck driver eyewitnesses at the rest stop did not tell the police that Jesse murdered those officers. According to the eyewitnesses, Jesse was pushed up against the cruiser when the shots rang out. And yet Jesse Tafero was the person who went to the electric chair. Is that why the State Attorney’s Office is hiding the files? “Hello?” I am startled back into the present. The supervisor I’ve been calling at the State Attorney’s Office has answered the phone herself this time. Super friendly, super apologetic about a plumbing emergency that she says has preoccupied her all week. Yes, she has the files, she says. “You can come see them right now, if you want.” • An hour later I am sitting at a table in a windowless library on the sixth floor of the Broward County courthouse. The library is lined floor-to-

ceiling with law books, row upon row of black and red and gilt. Around me are a dozen boxes holding the prosecutor’s files of State v. Tafero, stacked in tidy towers. These boxes are pristine. Well-tended manila folders, organized by subject, alphabetized. The files have some of the same documents as those shabby boxes over in the courthouse, but many more too—the entire case file from the Florida Highway Patrol, reports filed by the officers who rushed to the rest area after Trooper Black’s 10-24, transcripts for both trials. The morning of February 20, 1976, is before me once more. • At the roadblock—twenty-three miles north of the highway rest area— blood has soaked into the orange-and-cream plaid upholstery of the bulletriddled carjacked Cadillac. The Cadillac is still where it crashed, crumpled headfirst into a dirt-filled tractor-trailer truck. A plainclothes police officer is leaving the scene, taking Sunny Jacobs and the children—the nine-year-old boy and the ten-month-old baby girl— over to the Delray Beach substation of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. When they get there, Sunny and her children are separated. A clerk strip-searches Sunny, watches as Sunny uses the toilet and washes her hands and face, and then brings Sunny to an interrogation room. Two policemen and a tape recorder are waiting. The officers are Captain Valjean Haley of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office and Broward Sheriff’s Office detective lieutenant Angelo Farinato. They read Sunny her rights, then get the interrogation off to a quick start. Haley informs Sunny that she is under arrest for first-degree murder. Sunny laughs. Farinato steps in. Det. Lt. Farinato: Alright. Who was with you this morning? Sunny Jacobs: We were in the back seat, of the car. […] Det. Lt. Farinato: Alright, where were you sitting in the car? Sunny Jacobs: In the back.

Det. Lt. Farinato: Alright, now who was— Sunny Jacobs: Through this whole thing I…I…I sat in the back of that car. Who were the men in the Cadillac with her? The man in the blue shirt? The man in the tan pants, with the beard? Sunny does not know. She does not know their names or where they are from. Sunny Jacobs: I don’t know. I don’t know. Sunny also does not know who fired the shots. Sunny Jacobs: I didn’t see. I didn’t see. Asked directly, she says she herself did not shoot anyone or fire a gun that day. The officers remind her that she is under oath. She says she knows that. “I—I’d like to help but I’d like to help myself,” she tells them. • Jesse Tafero, in a separate interrogation room at the Delray Beach substation, is not talking. The officers turn a tape recorder on and run through the Miranda warning questions, including “Do you understand that I am a police officer?” and “You have the right to remain silent….Do you understand this?” Tafero says just one thing: “I want an attorney.” With that, the questions stop. Tafero is taken to a hospital, where a nurse treats abrasions on his temple and finds a foil packet of cocaine in his sock. Jesse does talk briefly to the nurse. He tells her, “I have been on a bad trip.” • Walter Rhodes is in the emergency room of Bethesda Memorial Hospital, waiting to be admitted to surgery. He is awake and in a great deal of pain, according to the hospital records. Walter’s left leg has been shattered by the roadblock gunshot. His left knee is bleeding profusely and his left foot is

cold and mottled with no pulse—early gangrene is setting in. He is surrounded by police officers as the doctors and nurses move him from room to room. He’s been Mirandized two times already, once at 8:37 a.m.— he was unable to sign his rights card—and again at 9:43 a.m. He has not had pain medication yet, according to the notes on his hospital chart. At first Walter insists that he does not want to talk to anybody, but then he changes his mind. He tells Detective Fred Mascaro of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office that he “didn’t do anything” and that he “wasn’t the one that shot the trooper.” Then Walter gets shots of Demerol, a painkiller, and Phenergan, a sedative, and after that he can’t talk anymore. The next day, after a long night on morphine, Walter gives another statement from his hospital bed, this time to Captain Valjean Haley. Walter is under oath, on tape. The statement is twenty-four typewritten pages long. Capt. Haley: What is the only reason or what is the various reasons that you are making this statement? Walter Rhodes: Because I feel like, I feel at ease with you, particularly I feel like I can talk to you, I don’t feel like you are going to stab me because I believe, I just feel, at ease talking to you, you know, I would like to clear this up and you seem to be the one I want to talk to. Then Walter tells Haley that he knows what happened. Sunny shot first from the back of the car, and then Jesse grabbed the gun and finished the officers off, Walter says. Capt. Haley: Let me interrupt at this time, when the shot went off did you actually witness the shots? Walter Rhodes: I actually witnessed the shots. As Walter is giving his statement, a doctor pokes his head into the room and tells Walter that he is going to cut Walter’s leg off. •

Interesting, I think, as I put the folders back in their file boxes. Before coming in here today, I already knew that Walter had talked to the police and cut a deal to testify against Sunny and Jesse. But I had not known that Sunny told the officers she didn’t know the guys she was with in the Camaro, or that Jesse had not said one word at all. A squealer, a liar, and a mute. Whom to believe? • It’s the next documents, though, that rattle me. In that wedding announcement in The New York Times, the one that took me by surprise at my breakfast table three years ago, the newspaper reported that Sunny and Jesse were in the car at the rest area with Walter Rhodes because “he was giving the couple a ride from Miami to the home of friends in West Palm Beach.” The Scotsman, a Scottish daily newspaper, reported in 2005: “Tafero’s friend, Walter Rhodes, offered them a lift part of the way home. Jacobs didn’t like him, but he was willing to drive them north.” Sunny Jacobs, to The Scotsman: “It was only a ride.” So the property receipts catch me off guard. Officers who searched Jesse and Walter and Sunny and the crime scene and roadblock and the cars after the murders found two Smith & Wesson 9mm semiautomatic handguns, a Smith & Wesson .38 Special six-shot revolver, a North American Arms .22 short derringer, a Manuel Escodin Eibar .32 caliber revolver, a shoulder holster, a hatchet, and a bayonet. Those last two items were stashed in the backseat of the Camaro, behind the driver’s seat, along with a denim purse holding baby pajamas and a jar of Beech-Nut baby food. Drugs too. Amphetamines, cocaine, Quaaludes, marijuana, hashish, glutethimide—a hypnotic sedative that produces intense euphoria. Thorazine. Pentazocine. Cigarettes. Beer. Jewelry: earrings, rings, necklaces, pendants, charms, loose gemstones. Forty pieces of identification in other people’s names, including birth certificates, driver’s licenses, passports, adoption papers, voter registrations,

Selective Service registrations, checking accounts, and library cards. A flesh-colored over-the-head rubber mask with a white wig attached. And ammunition. So much ammunition. Bullets loaded in the weapons taken off Walter and Jesse at the roadblock, bullets loaded in the gun found in Sunny’s purse. Bullets in cardboard boxes in the Cadillac at the roadblock and bullets in a black plastic ammo case at the crime scene, right there on the backseat of the Camaro, where Sunny and the kids were sitting. • “And not just the Cadillac and the Camaro. The apartment too,” I tell Peter later, at dinner. At the courthouse, I’d looked through a stack of case photographs from the archives. Eight-by-ten glossies of the crime scene and also pictures taken of Walter’s apartment the evening after the murders, when his landlady let the police inside. I have copies of them here with me now. Two thin and bare mattresses. A bullet on the floor next to a box of Pampers. A weight-lifting bench with a handwritten list on it of bills coming due. Rent, $165. Karate mementos. Cast-off clothes on the floor, on the couch, spilling out of suitcases. A black-light bulb, an empty container of L’eggs pantyhose, an eight-track tape for a Gregg shorthand course. Dirty coffee cups and cereal bowls and a baby bottle on the kitchen counter. The fridge door open, the fridge empty except for a tipped-over jar of baby food, a bowl, and a dirty yellow cloth. “I’d say the apartment looks like a bomb hit it, but it actually looks messier than that,” I say. I’ve put the photos on the table and we’re studying them. “It looks like whoever was in that apartment was so busy doing whatever it was they were busy doing that they forgot to eat or sleep or clean up after themselves.” “Or pick their stray bullets up off the floor,” Peter says, looking closely. And then he pushes a pile of news clips across the table. “You need to read these.” The Palm Beach Post, July 1974: A Miami man, described by a Dade County organized crime investigator as “the principal member

of a major narcotics smuggling organization,” yesterday was arrested in conjunction with a marijuana-laden boat which burned in Lake Worth two weeks ago. Richard Douglas Cravero was arrested with three other persons at the home of convicted stamp thief John Clarence Cook and charged with possession of marijuana with the intent to resell. Fort Lauderdale News, June 1977: Two reputed minor members of the notorious Cravero gang have been indicted by the Broward County Grand Jury in connection with [a] brutal 1975 murder….The body…was found floating in a western Broward rock pit…shot three times in the head and weighed down with rugs, concrete, and an anchor….Cravero’s gang, sometimes known as the Dixie Mafia, was heavily involved in South Florida drug traffic but it was their brutality which sparked their notoriety. Boat-burning. Drug-smuggling. Car-bombing. Body-littering. The notorious Ricky Cravero was arrested in Marianne’s home in 1974. He was arrested with Marianne in 1975. Ricky knew Marianne, and Marianne knew Jesse. But what does that prove? Nothing. Still, that apartment was a wreck. Bullets. Diapers. Jewelry. Guns, stolen passports, Quaaludes, cocaine. What did Sunny say? It was only a ride. She said Jesse was soft-spoken and gentle. “He was polite and well-mannered.” That’s what Sunny wrote about Jesse in her book. “He was the light and I had to follow the light.” And Walter—Walter confessed. As I look through the news stories and the photographs, I can feel myself starting to tremble. I try to steel myself against it: Here it comes. But it is stronger than I am, this undertow. Fear. Real, visceral, immediate. The same fear I felt after I went to talk to Walter Rhodes. Not the first time I talked to him, in 1990, when he was in prison. The other time. When he was out of prison and on the run from the law.

I 6 The Fugitive t started with a show on the radio. In October 2002, I was driving across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco when I heard the word “exonerated” together with the name “Jesse Tafero” coming out of the speakers of my car stereo. I turned the radio up. A play telling the true stories of six innocent people on death row was about to open in New York City, National Public Radio was reporting. The Exonerated was a documentary work, drawn entirely from court records, police reports, and interviews. “Every word in this thing is real,” the play’s director, Bob Balaban, told NPR. Reporter: Late one night in 1976, Sunny Jacobs and her common-law husband, Jesse Tafero, got a ride to a friend’s house in Broward County, Florida. The driver got tired and pulled over to take a nap. On a routine patrol of the rest area, police ran a check on the driver and found he was on parole. Then, Sunny Jacobs says, the driver grabbed a gun and killed the two officers. Sunny Jacobs: After he shot the policemen, the man who had done it made us get in the police car with him, and he drove us off. Sunny’s voice coming through my car speakers was girlish, hesitant, sweet.

Reporter: In 1992, two years after Jesse Tafero was executed, lawyers uncovered evidence clearing him and Sunny Jacobs. The rest of my drive that day was a blur. I was heading into San Francisco to do interviews for a case about the ferries that ran out to Alcatraz, and I’d recently been spending quite a bit of time out on that prison island, listening to the wind whistle along the cold cellblocks as the gulls wheeled and keened overhead. That morning, though, I got a cup of coffee and took it down to the stone steps at the water’s edge beside the old sailing ships of Fisherman’s Wharf. I needed to think. Up on Russian Hill, behind me, was the detective’s mansion. Six years ago, I’d started my life as a private eye there. Since then I had worked as an investigator on some brutal cases, digging deep into crimes so violent that they’d stalked my dreams. A young woman kidnapped, raped, killed with a shovel, and buried in a shallow grave. An elderly drifter beaten to death in the marijuana hinterland up near the Oregon border. That case had hinged on the testimony of a young child. When I found him, by then grown up, he told me he wondered if maybe he had just dreamed the whole thing. Some of the murder cases I’d worked on for the detective, but after three years with his firm I’d taken a job as an investigator for the State of California, defending death row inmates. Now my friend Freya and I had our own detective agency, and just the past year we’d been down in Bakersfield talking to jurors who’d sent a serial killer to San Quentin State Prison. I’d seen death cases up close, I’d learned how complicated facts in those cases can be, how hard it is to overturn a conviction. How very rarely someone walks free, as Sunny did, and how important that is when it happens. And all along the way, I’d tried not to think too hard about Jesse Tafero. • “I have to see this play,” I told my new boyfriend that evening. Peter and I had met exactly a year earlier, through a mutual friend. John was a buddy of mine from my newspaper days; for more than half a decade, he’d been telling me about this other friend of his and saying we should all get together sometime. It wasn’t until October 2001, though, that brand-new

world, that we all three finally made plans for a Saturday morning coffee. A totally routine thing, except that when I came around the corner of the coffee shop and saw the handsome man sitting at a table with my friend John, I thought: Oh hey, it’s you. Just like that. We were instantly friends. Peter grew up in Chicago; his dad worked in the steel mills and died when Peter was ten; Peter had spent years working as an actor and then in publishing; he’d written travel guides and directed plays; he loved theater and dancing and music and cooking and reading and gardening. Life, basically. Every thing, every day. A radiance. We met for drinks. We went out to dinner. We talked about our love lives. He was dating an emergency room nurse, I was dating an organic gardener. I thought Peter was smart and charming and funny. He had a lovely way of listening, free from comment, free from advice. He was warm and open and kind and honest. And he was gay. He’d dated women when he was young, but at the age of twenty-seven he’d come out and had identified as a gay man ever since—for almost twenty years. Which was fine. I’d always had gay friends and had dated women myself, so there was zero confusion about what was going on. Peter was my friend. My good friend. We were good friends who went out dancing. Who went out dancing pretty much every Saturday night. And one Saturday night, at the gay dance bar we always went to, something unexpected happened. We’d had a lot of tequila, I guess. We kissed. “I don’t see how this is going to work out,” I told him, a few weeks later, on the telephone. Peter and I had seen each other constantly since that night at the dance bar, and every single time we saw each other was magic, but now I’d decided that no matter how good things seemed to be, our relationship was impossible—who had ever heard of such a thing?—and we should end it. Most of our friends were in shock, seeing the two of us together. There was no point in trying to invent something new when it would only lead to heartbreak. “It’s too complicated,” I told him, and hung up the phone. About a half hour later, I heard a knock on the door. I opened it, and there was Peter, his collar turned up against the California winter rains. He took me in his arms, and he kissed me. “This,” he said, “is not complicated.” And he kissed me again.

Now, six months later, we were on his porch in Oakland and I was going through the whole long story about Sunny and Jesse and Walter. And me. It had been a long time since I’d said it all out loud. I hesitated. I stumbled. I confided. Peter listened. “The radio report said that lawyers uncovered evidence that cleared Jesse Tafero and Sunny Jacobs,” I said. “Cleared them.” “Oh my God, you need to see this play,” Peter said. • I was nervous as we took our seats at 45 Bleecker, the downtown theater in New York City where The Exonerated was playing. The stage was bare, just a row of music stands and stools. A hush fell over the audience as the actors came out and took their places. About ten minutes into the show, it was Sunny’s turn to talk. The actress Anne Jackson—she’d played a doctor in The Shining—was Sunny this evening, feisty and fragile as the spotlight found her onstage. “In 1976, I was sentenced to death row, which for me wasn’t a row at all, because I was the only woman in the country who had the sentence of death. So I suggested they put me in the same cell as my husband!” Sunny said, in the play. Laughter. A beat. “But let me start at the beginning.” As one, the audience leaned forward to listen. Ninety minutes later, the instant the play was over, I stood up and walked out. Peter rushed after me. New York City. Car horns, footsteps, headlights, cigarettes, snippets of conversation. I sat down hard on the curb outside the theater, my head spinning. “I mean, Rhodes had just killed two policemen,” Sunny said, in the play. That was it. No discussion. No evidence. That was the entire explanation. “I was a hippie, I’m one of those peace-and-love people, I’m a vegetarian! How could you possibly think I would kill someone?” “But the guns in the car—those were Sunny’s guns. She bought them,” I told Peter, who’d come to sit next to me. I remembered that fact from the news stories I’d read. “And she wasn’t exonerated, actually,” I added. Sunny’s conviction had indeed been overturned on appeal, but not because the court had determined that she was blameless in the murders. In 1992, the appeals court ruled that

the prosecution had improperly withheld the report of Walter’s polygraph test from the defense, and also that statements Sunny made the morning of the murders had been admitted into evidence in violation of her constitutional rights. That’s why the court reversed her conviction and ordered a new trial. Sunny had finally gotten out of prison on a special kind of plea called an Alford plea, which allowed her to claim innocence while admitting under oath that the state could prove certain incriminating facts against her. An Alford plea does have some important bells and whistles to it, but legally speaking it is a guilty plea. In the eyes of the law, Sunny wasn’t innocent. She was a convicted felon. I felt dizzy. Everything I’d learned over the past six years as an investigator was clanging around inside my head. You were supposed to look at all the facts. That was where the truth could be found. Not just the facts that fit whatever theory you were trying to prove. And anyway, Ted Bundy was a vegetarian. But that wasn’t the only thing troubling me. Or even the main thing, if I was going to be honest with myself, which definitely now seemed overdue. It was the confession. Walter’s confession. Sunny [to audience]: In 1979, Walter Rhodes wrote the following letter to a judge. Rhodes: I, Walter Norman Rhodes, hereby depose and say that I am under no duress nor coercion to execute this affidavit. This statement is made freely and voluntarily, and to purge myself before my Creator. Briefly. On February 20, 1976, at approximately seven-fifteen a.m., I did, in fact, shoot to death two law-enforcement officers with a nine-millimeter Browning pistol. I state emphatically and unequivocally that my previous testimony against Jesse Tafero and Sonia Jacobs was false…I so swear. Of course I knew that Walter had confessed. Until seeing the play, though, I had not known what Walter’s confession had said. What his exact words had been. “Before my Creator”—that sounded just like the Walter Rhodes I interviewed in prison before the execution. He’d been all into karma and fate and destiny and souls. Walter had recanted this confession, along with all his other ones. But to me those words rang true.

• “Do you really think this is a good idea?” Peter said. It was shortly after our trip to New York. We were moving in together, we were engaged to be married, and now we were at the front door of our house on the verge of a serious fight. “It’s a very good idea,” I said, cramming a sweater into my suitcase. My plane was leaving in two hours. I wasn’t used to reporting my whereabouts to anyone. Or getting permission to go. After seeing The Exonerated, I decided that I needed to talk to Walter Rhodes again. I needed to ask him if he “did, in fact, shoot to death two law-enforcement officers,” like his confession in the play had said. I needed an answer, and I needed to hear it from him. In the weeks since the play, I had not been sleeping. I’d felt flashes of Q-Wing around the edges of my days. Smoke, flame. The hollow buzzing. So I’d looked Walter up on the Florida Department of Corrections website. But Walter was not in prison anymore. He was not on parole, either. “Walter Rhodes is a fugitive,” Peter was saying. “He is on the run from the law.” That did happen to be true. According to the Florida Department of Corrections website, Walter was on the lam. And had been for the past nine years, ever since he was released from prison on parole—and disappeared. “Walter knows me, I interviewed him,” I said, zipping up my suitcase. A fugitive. Whatever. I was a private eye. I knew how to knock on a door. “It’s going to be fine.” • It had not been difficult to find Walter. Back in 1990, when I interviewed him at Avon Park Correctional Institution, he had told me he had a prison romance going with a woman who lived in New Mexico. Her name was Sara, and she called him Michael. A bit of computer research using Sara’s first and last name in combination with “New Mexico” and the name “Michael” turned up a pair of likely people in a remote town near the

Canadian border, in the high-desert heart of Washington where it seldom rains. I flew up on a Saturday morning, first to Seattle and then in a small prop plane over the Cascades to Wenatchee. From there I headed north along the Columbia River gorge, a wild stretch of blue water and high dry cliffs. It was a far-flung part of the country, but I’d been along this road before—on a death penalty case, one with terrible crime scene photos of a woman bound hand and foot in a motel bathroom, violated and then beaten to death. I’d ended up driving for hours that night, unable to stop. The floodlit parking lots of the motels along the highway had seemed spectral to me. Today, though, I was on this road in daylight, and I felt okay. Almost okay. The closer I got, the harder I tried to work out how it might go. Confronting a fugitive about murder. Hi, Walter? So, I’m wondering, is there any chance that— No. It’s not like I could slide a question about the roadside slaying of two police officers into casual conversation. I was going to have to straight-up challenge him. Did you kill them? I definitely felt nervous about that. With the river behind me, I turned west across a plain, climbing steadily. The afternoon sun cast long shadows across the tall grass. In dry streambeds, rocks shone like moonstones. My car was the only car on the road. I passed through a deserted town with houses of weathered wood and found the lake just beyond it, but then my sense of direction ran out just as the cellphone service did. On my third pass along the south end of the lake, I saw a phone booth. The old-fashioned kind, right by the side of the road, out here in the middle of nowhere. “I can’t find them,” I said, shouting down the line to Peter above the wind that hit me as soon as I stepped out of the car. “At this point I’m just driving around.” “Come home.” That was what I was afraid he’d say. I wanted to. I could hear voices in the background, the clink of drinks in glasses, shouts of laughter. A weekend night with our friends in San Francisco getting under way.

“You’ve done everything you can,” Peter said. “If they don’t want to be found, maybe you should just leave them be.” Just that instant a car pulled out onto the road from the trees beyond the phone booth. I peered over. There was a driveway hidden in that roadside thicket. “Oh God,” I said. “What’s going on?” Peter said. “I’ve got to go,” I said, already hanging up. • So here I was, easing my little gray rental car down a rocky dirt road, out of cellphone range, with the trees closing in around me. I was edging toward the home of a man who had pled guilty to two murders, pled guilty to kidnapping, served nearly two decades in prison, gotten out, gone on the lam, and tried his very best to disappear. It was almost five o’clock by the time I pulled up at the end of a driveway in front of a double-wide trailer underneath a stand of pines. There was a lake behind the trailer and on the opposite shore a steep wooded slope, cast in shadow. I stopped for a moment and listened. Nothing. Not a thing except for the ticking of the engine as it cooled. I remembered again the promise I’d made to myself when I began working as a private investigator. You can’t un-knock on a door, but you don’t have to let anyone know you’re out there in the first place. “You looking for the campground?” A woman’s voice, from behind me. I recognized it from a phone conversation I’d had with her about Walter years earlier, when I was at The Miami Herald, right after the execution. I took a deep breath. “Actually, Sara,” I said, turning around, “I’m looking for you.” • A short, plump woman with graying hair, wearing a blue gardening shirt and khaki pants, she had appeared at the corner of the yard, standing near

the house, arms folded across her chest. She did not look friendly. Not one tiny bit. I’d have thought that the proprietress of a doomsday collective might be a little more chatty, just for marketing purposes, but no. I happened to know that in the years since we last spoke, Sara had been channeling messages from extraterrestrial beings called the Hosts of Heaven—You are the sensory tip of a “finger” of your Oversoul, thrust into the “pudding” of your present space/time environment—who had been telling her about the mother ships that would soon arrive to lift true believers to the Fourth Density. Walter had been helping out with the prophesies, under the name Lord Michael Andronicus. They had a website and a mailing list, more than six hundred hopeful souls waiting to be Harvested. All is in hand. All is being prepared. You have suffered enough, beloveds. Soon you will be at the banquet. “I used to be a reporter for The Miami Herald,” I told Sara now. “We talked on the phone a couple of times about Walter. Do you remember?” “No.” “Well, I’m hoping to talk to Walter now—is he around?” “Oh, he skipped a long time ago,” Sara said, super casually. She started walking across the yard toward me, and when she reached me she kept going. I could see that I was being herded back to my car. “I want to talk to him because I saw The Exonerated.” “Well, I don’t know where he is. He just ran out and I haven’t heard from him. For years.” She had brought me to a halt right outside the driver’s-side door to my car, and was standing now between me and the house with a distinct Okay! Bye! expression on her face. I was just about to get in and drive off—if he’s not here, he’s not here— when the door to the house opened and a man came out. He was heavier, his hair was longer and graying, and he had a salt-and-pepper beard, but otherwise, yes. There he was. Still very good-looking, with a wave of silver hair over chiseled features and intense dark eyes. “Do you recognize me?” I asked Walter Rhodes. “No.”

“I talked to you in Avon Park.” He stared at me for what felt like a long time. “Let’s go inside,” he said finally. “The jig is up!” Sara cried out from behind us. She sounded angry. Or maybe afraid. • Inside, the trailer was tidy, a long rectangle with an office desk at one end and a bedroom at the other, kitchen and living area in the middle, a big couch against the far wall. Next to the couch a sliding glass door opened onto a deck. There were no electric lights on, just sun filtering in through the pine woods. At Walter’s direction I took a seat on the couch. Sara sat down next to me and Walter pulled a dining chair over and sat in front of me, almost knee to knee. They had boxed me in. Sara was discernibly tense and Walter seemed fierce. He was not friendly at all, I realized with dismay. He was also most definitely between me and the door. I’d have to clamber right over him to get out. It occurred to me that possibly Peter had been right. Dropping in unannounced on a fugitive in the middle of the woods in Nowhere, Washington, might not have been the brightest idea anybody ever had. “Why are you here?” Walter asked. I launched into an explanation: the execution, The Exonerated. “But what I’m asking you is, why are you here? What are you getting at?” Walter said. “Well, I saw the play, and they’re pretty clear that they think you did it, and I thought I’d come here and ask you myself whether you’d changed your mind about what you told me, back in 1990. Because if you changed your mind about all that, I want to know.” I was about to say more, but Sara jumped in. “In March 1981, the Christ materialized in my bedroom and put his hands on me,” Sara began. Uh-oh.

“I was a member of Christ’s inner circle,” she said, leaning toward me. I nodded pleasantly. As one does. “In 1987, Christ appeared to me again and told me to prepare my heart for ‘the greater love that comes,’ and a month later, I got a letter from this man right here. He was calling himself Walter Rhodes but I knew he was my twin soul from the higher density, and that his real name was—” She faltered, and Walter put his hand on her back. “His name was Lord Michael Andronicus,” she continued. “Walter Rhodes is dead to me,” said Walter Rhodes. I literally could not think of one single thing to say. “Have you had anything to eat?” Walter asked Sara. “No,” Sara said tearfully. “Well, why don’t you do that, and Ellen and I will go for a walk.” • A short lawn covered in pine needles led down to the lake. Across the water, a mountain ridge rose to the sky. The water was blue and black, clear at the shore but darker as it deepened, and it reflected the sky as a mirror. There was an aluminum rowboat upside down on the sandy beach, and Walter and I walked down to that. Walter put his plaid overshirt on it and we sat down. “You know, The Exonerated pretty much says flat out that you killed those officers,” I began. “Did you?” “I did not murder those officers. No.” “I just need to know the truth,” I said. “That is the truth. I did not murder Trooper Black or Constable Irwin.” “But you confessed.” “I really regret that.” “Yeah, well,” I said, after a moment. I dug a pack of cigarettes out of my pocket and offered him one, but he didn’t smoke, just as he didn’t smoke thirteen years ago when I interviewed him in prison. I lit one and smoked in silence, thinking.

I believed him, absolutely. Almost absolutely. I did not know. It was hard to know. I felt like I knew Walter, though. He knew about the murders, the blood monolith suddenly in the center of my life again. We could speak the language of the case—Jesse, Sunny, the rest area, Trooper Black, Constable Irwin—without having to explain or define anything. What it meant. That felt incredibly important to me. He was watching me. “See that ridge?” he asked me. “The one over across the lake?” I looked where he was pointing. A steep stand of spruce, stepping up from the dark water. “The UFOs are so beautiful when they land there.” But there’s never any trace of them, Walter added. He hikes over to see. Nothing. I just nodded. “Well, there’s a lot about life we don’t understand,” I said, flicking an ash off the end of my cigarette. Today, in particular, that seemed true. “We’re energy, talking right now,” Walter said. “I’m talking to energy and so are you.” • Next Walter took me on a little tour of the property, which was part of a campground, an old-school 1950s roughing-it kind of place. Just outside the door to the campground office was a pay phone, and as Walter and I passed it, I said I wanted to call my boyfriend. I knew that if I did not call, Peter would worry, and if Peter got worried he might alert the police. He was not a sit-by-the-phone kind of person. He was a pick-up-the-phone-and-do-something guy. I liked that about him. It was just that it felt a little awkward right now, because possibly Walter suspected I was calling the cops myself. Peter’s phone rang just once before he picked up. “You’re with them right now?”

“It’s fine,” I whispered. “I’ll call you later. I love you. Bye.” • The sun had set by the time Walter and I got back to the house, and I told them it was time for me to go. “Why don’t you stay here?” Sara said. “It would be great,” Walter added. This was crazy, obviously. To think about spending the night in this isolated house with an escaped convicted murderer and a woman who had Jesus on her own personal team. But I was curious. Maybe Walter’s story was going to change, maybe he would tell me something new. Sometimes there’s more between the last question and the door, and it might be worth hanging around to find out. Also, I was afraid of the long drive back to the airport, of those bleak roadside motels. “Okay, thanks,” I said. I went outside to the campground pay phone to call Peter again. He didn’t pick up, so I left him a message to tell him I was spending the night here with Walter and Sara. I didn’t want to think of his reaction. It was almost dark, and as I walked back to the house the woods around me rustled, the sound of leaves and needles and branches and wind. • Dinner was beef with pine nuts in a tomato and zucchini broth, plus toast. Walter gave me a glass with “Let Go and Let God” on it and said water tasted better in it. After dinner, a movie. The Shawshank Redemption. They could not believe I had never seen it. We sat knee to knee to knee on the couch, Sara/me/Walter, bolt upright, each with our own lap blanket and glass of water. Onscreen, prison cells, prison beatings, prison blackmail, prison rapes. A “very accurate” movie, Walter said approvingly. Their cat, Amador, was on my lap, purring, which they took as a good sign. Also good signs: I’m a Virgo, like Walter. I am from New York, like Sara. I have “good energy” and “good intuition,” like

Walter. There was a house empty next door, Walter said, maybe I should think about moving up there and spending more time with them. After the movie, they gave me a fresh pile of blankets and pillows for the couch and switched off the lights. I went to sleep. I was dreaming about accidentally leading the cops to Walter when I was startled awake by a scream. A choking, gurgling, strangly, coughing, howling, full-throttle scream. I opened my eyes. It was dark. Another scream, the same sound as the first, but higher pitched now. It was outside the windows just at the head of the couch. Getting closer. That afternoon down at the rowboat, Walter had said something that fucking freaked me out. When he was released from prison, he’d said, he was a ball of rage, and he had made a list of everybody who’d ever crossed him. A list of people he wanted to hunt down and kill. He knew how to use the Internet, he told me. He was good at finding people. Suddenly Walter and Sara burst screaming into the living room, in the dark. “The other door, get the other door!” Sara shouted. “You are a bad cat!” Walter shouted. To Amador, hissing on the porch. I tried to fall back asleep, but no dice. The cat’s air-raid-siren scream rattled inside my head, an echoing ricochet. I pulled the blankets over myself and slid down into the couch cushions, trying to hide. I could feel a darkness suddenly that was unlike anything I’d ever been near before. Empty, erasing, obliterating. Carnivorous. It was coming for me. • In the morning, I got up early and slipped out of the house. The woods had the cool of the night still on them as I walked down to the pay phone. Peter picked up instantly. “My God, are you okay?” “You are talking to the world’s dumbest detective,” I whispered into the phone. “I can’t get into it right now. I’ll be home soon.” Up at the house, Walter and Sara were cheery. Over a breakfast of ricotta omelets with blueberries, they mentioned an investigator named Walt

LaGraves who had been very helpful to them; he’d shown up at Walter’s parole hearing and vouched for Walter’s release, they said. I made a mental note of the name, and I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette before hitting the road. Walter joined me. “You know, The Shawshank Redemption, it’s accurate, but those were the old days. Prison is even worse than that now,” he said. Even in this sunshine, I could feel the fear from last night. Ice, inside my spine. “I do not want to go back to prison,” Walter said. He was looking at me closely. “But then I think, maybe going back to prison would be worth it if it would clear my name.” A pause. “Why did you come here?” “I need to know the truth about what happened,” I said. “The truth? What does the truth matter? The truth is just what the most people believe.” • A couple of months after my trip to Washington, Peter and I went on our honeymoon. Just days earlier we’d been in San Francisco, in a bar filled with flowers and family and friends, holding hands while our friend John read our wedding vows and pronounced us—it was unbelievable—married. Now we were in the sea off the southern coast of Spain, clear waves breaking over us, aquamarine, dazzling in the light. The drums were starting again on the top of the cliff, and soon we would be toweling off, climbing the stairs, and heading to a club lounge in a tent overlooking the coast of Africa to sit and watch the night arrive. “This is here all the time, this paradise,” Peter said, with a wide sweep of his arm that took in—everything. The beach, the sand, the wind, the water, our wedding rings, the sunlight, me. “Now that I know about it, I’m always going to want to be here, always.”

“You can’t look at things that way.” I laughed. “You have to look at it like you will always have it, just because we have ever been here at all.” Traveling with you in your heart. In your memory. In who you are. It’s not just sorrow that carries forward. Joy does too. “Don’t you think?” I asked. I wanted it to be true. • We were just back from our honeymoon when the phone rang. Suitcases still in the front hall, mail stacked on the dining room table. “It’s Sara,” Peter said, holding the phone out to me. “Who?” But I felt a chill. Peter and I had talked about my trip up to Washington State, of course. But not in detail. I didn’t want to put him in peril by telling him too much— it can be dangerous to know what you know—and I also so regretted ever having gone there, the recklessness of that trip and how completely I had underestimated what I’d be getting into. Dropping in on an escaped convict, la-di-da. I just wanted to pretend the trip hadn’t happened. “You were right,” I’d told Peter, as soon as I got back. “I should never have gone.” “Sara?” I said now, into the phone. “So, you turned us in,” Sara said. I felt myself freeze. “Walter was arrested last week,” Sara continued. For parole violation. For being a fugitive from the law. Sara and Walter had been on a quick trip to a local junkyard when they got pulled over and surrounded by armed policemen. Walter was back behind bars and facing a long term in state prison. Again. “Are you happy now?” Sara asked me. “Sara, I’ve been in Spain on my honeymoon. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “You haven’t been on your honeymoon, Ellen. You’ve been with Sunny Jacobs. You’ve been doing this for her all along. I warned Walter about you but he didn’t listen.”

I glanced over at Peter, who was singing along to the radio as he sorted our mail on the dining room table. I thought of what Walter had said about his kill list of people who’d crossed him. I looked at the open front door of our little house, on its completely unprotected street in Berkeley, California, where nobody would ever call the cops on anyone “suspicious” lest they accidentally violate someone’s civil rights. After I got off the phone, I looked it up online. “FHP Captures Parolee Wanted Since ’94 Using Computer Database Proficiency” was the headline of an article about Walter’s arrest on the Florida Highway Patrol website. After seeing Walter’s picture on the Florida’s Most Wanted website, an FHP lieutenant ran some searches, found Walter at the same address I had, and notified the Washington State Police, who swooped in with weapons drawn. Florida’s Most Wanted. And me on the doorstep, so confident that my quest for the truth would protect me, like a magic shield. A few months later, I came across Sara’s new website, a compendium of documents from Walter’s case. A “news/update” let her followers know that Lord Michael Andronicus was in prison, and stated as a fact that I had turned him in. I was no match for these people, I could see that. Walter’s arrest coming so soon after my visit—it was a coincidence. That’s all. True, I had been careful not to tip Walter and Sara off about just how easily I’d found them. I’d said it had been super hard work to track them down. I had not wanted to drive them further underground. Clearly, though, they did not believe in coincidences. Walter had probably already added my name to his kill list. He’d probably inked me in right at the top. This was too much for me. I’d waded too far in and realized, much too late, that I had gotten in way over my head. And now I was getting out. Whatever happened, whoever was guilty, it wasn’t my business. Working as a private detective had taught me to mask my own emotions—be a mirror, be a blank slate—and now I was going to use that job skill for my own benefit. In fact, I was going to take it one level deeper, and simply not feel anything about this at all. I was absolutely confident about my ability to carry that off. From here on, I promised myself, my policy was: I don’t fucking care.

That December I wrote a short opinion piece for the San Francisco Chronicle about The Exonerated, the play that had spurred my rash trip in the first place, listing my intellectual concerns about the way it presented some of the facts of the case. Then I boxed up all my notes and court documents and drove over to the shredding plant. I put the two cassette tapes of my 1990 prison interview with Walter in the boxes too, but at the very last moment I pulled them out. Then I watched as every piece of paper I had about Walter and Jesse and Sunny got turned into dust.

“W 7 Don’t You Worry That Someone Is Going to Kill You? hat is that? Is that the wind?” Peter and I are still at the dining room table in our rented Florida bungalow. The news clips about the Cravero gang are still in front of us. The police photos of Walter’s apartment too. It’s midnight now. I hear rustling. There is someone in the hedge. Or on the roof. “That’s the wind,” Peter says. The bungalow came furnished in midcentury modern décor, aqua and ivory. The floor is cold, bare, white. One whole wall of the living room is windows. Thin glass in aluminum frames. The curtains are sheer, billowing in the breeze. A person walking past could see right in. This house is exposed. How did I not notice that before? For years after my visit to Walter in the woods, I startled awake in the night. What is that noise, I think there’s someone out there—quiet, be quiet, listen. I’d lie there in the dark, my heart racing. Trying to reason with my fear. Failing. It was a corporeal alarm that defied the promise I’d made to myself to not feel anything, and resisted my best efforts to think it away. So I did the only thing I could do. I buried it. Now it’s back. •

In the morning, I drive to Miami to look up Walter’s criminal history. In 1990, when I interviewed Walter in prison, I asked him about his past. He was on parole at the rest area that morning, and I wanted to know what for. “Was that armed robbery?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said. But with a toy pistol, he told me. “That’s the extent of me being a bad guy,” he said. I pictured a plastic water gun. Back then, I believed him. But today I need to know: Did Walter Rhodes have a motive to murder two officers that morning? Interstate 95 is jammed all the way down. The highway is paved out to the horizon, cars rushing and veering, sunlight bouncing off chrome. It takes me an hour and a half to go thirty miles. In 1976, when Trooper Black pulled into the rest area to begin his daily rounds—waking people up, moving them along—this road wasn’t even finished yet. • At the rest area, Trooper Black and Constable Irwin step out of Black’s Florida Highway Patrol cruiser into the dawn mist. It was a chilly night that just passed, and Black is checking to make sure everyone in the rest area is okay. To his left, traffic on the new interstate highway is light, three mostly empty lanes in each direction separated by a wide grassy median. As Irwin hangs back to observe, Black walks over to a green two-door Camaro. It’s dented, this car, rusted, front bumper twisted, headlights held on with electrical tape. Two men are up front, in bucket seats. Asleep. A wisp of a woman in the back with two children. They’re asleep too. Black leans in to look more closely. A blue denim diaper bag is behind the driver’s seat. Baby food, baby pajamas. But a gun, down at the driver’s feet. To the south, a truck pulls into the rest area. A Food Fair driver, on his morning coffee break. Black has the gun from the Camaro now. He’s woken the driver up, taken his license, and he’s back at the cruiser requesting a criminal history check on one Walter Rhodes. Dispatcher: The middle name on Rhodes was Raymond? Trooper Black: It’s Walter Norman Rhodes Jr.

Dispatcher: Walter Norman Rhodes, 9-2-50, does have a past, also possibly on probation. Trooper Black: Check Rhodes on his probation again. He was the one that was in possession of the weapon. It’s against the law in Florida for a convicted felon to possess a gun. Punishment: up to fifteen years in prison. Now Black is walking back over to the Camaro. Walter has gotten out of the Camaro and Black orders him up to the front of the patrol car. Next Black stands at the open door of the Camaro and talks to Jesse, who has moved over from the passenger’s side and is now sitting in the driver’s seat, and to Sunny, in the back. He’s asking them for their identification. Black spends some minutes there, bent over so he can get a good look inside the car. Then he backs out, straightens up, walks to the cruiser—and radios in again. He wants some advice. Trooper Black: OK. We got a car stopped up here at the rest area, woke them up, two white males, white female in the back with two infants, uh, recovered a weapon from under the driver seat. I believe he’s on parole. Uh, the male passenger in the front seat has no identification, he’s given me three different home residence addresses. The woman in the backseat claims to be his wife. She won’t give us any identification at all. They had a locked, uh, expensive looking attaché case up under the front seat. It’s locked by a combination lock. Uh, they hesitated, fiddled around with it, they both denied, denied ownership of it. 10-43? Dispatcher: 10-23 KIM 776. Trooper Black: We’ve run everything—given everything to the station we could finally put our hands on. But then Black calls out: Trooper Black: 10-24 Lauderdale.

“When the report came back on the police radio that Walter Rhodes actually was on parole at that point, the shots rang out,” Sunny told NPR in 2003. • At the Miami courthouse, the clerk tells me Walter’s case file from his armed robbery conviction is in the archives, so I will not be able to see it today. The file for Jesse’s prior, however, is right at hand. In Stolen Time, Sunny mentions Jesse’s criminal record. “He had been in prison for seven years for robbery,” is how Sunny described it. “He was so wounded. It was just awful to think of how much he’d suffered, being put in prison at such a young age.” This case file, though, on a blurry microfilm reel I’m reading at the clerk’s front counter, says it was not just robbery that sent young Jesse away. In 1967, according to Case 67-4835, Jesse Tafero—then age twenty— and a friend broke into an apartment, ransacked it, and sexually assaulted two young women at gunpoint, I’m reading now. They stripped, hog-tied, blindfolded, slapped, and dragged their victims; stole jewelry, money, silver, furs, a radio, and underwear; and when a neighbor tried to come to the rescue, they shot him and jumped off a balcony to get away. The victims were an Avon lady and a go-go dancer, and they lived on an island called North Bay Village, out in the middle of Biscayne Bay. • In 1967, North Bay Village—between Miami Beach and the mainland—had a lot going on. There were ten bombings, including the blast on John Clarence Cook’s boat, docked just across the water in Miami. “Open vice” flourished within the city borders, aided by a “deplorable lack of effective law enforcement,” a Florida Senate investigation reported. Anthony “Little Pussy” Russo, reportedly a top capo in the Genovese crime family, was among the village’s winter residents, dividing his time between a home there and his grand jury appearances up north, where his red corpuscles

suffered in the cold weather, news reports said. Frank Sinatra hung out on the island at a nightclub called Jilly’s South. That’s where the young go-go dancer in Jesse’s case worked. Next door to Jilly’s South, Dean Martin owned Dino’s. Nearby was A Place for Steak, notorious for a mob hit on Halloween night in 1967, when Anthony “Big Tony” Esperti whacked Tommy “the Enforcer” Altamura in the lounge. Five shots to the head. Actress Eva Gabor kept a plush condo on the island, and one night Ms. Gabor was tied up, pistol-whipped, and robbed of a twenty-five-thousanddollar diamond solitaire. She named as her assailant the same debonair Miami stunt diver who, a few years earlier, had made a big splash by stealing the 563.35-carat Star of India sapphire from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The diver’s name was Jack Murphy. A sun-and-fun beach boy—and a buddy of John Clarence Cook. On March 4, 1967, the go-go dancer got home from her shift at Jilly’s South at about half past six in the morning. As she opened her front door, she heard a voice say “Hey, you.” A man was standing inside the door, nude, with a nylon stocking over his head, holding a gun. The nude man put the gun in her face, told her not to scream, and told her this wasn’t a joke. He forced her into the bedroom, forced her to lie down on the floor, tied her hands and feet, and then called someone named “Jessie” on the telephone and told him to come over. Jesse Tafero said it wasn’t him. But both women picked Jesse out of a lineup, and, as the jury heard during the trial, Jesse lived with his parents just ten minutes away over the causeway bridge. Mr. and Mrs. Tafero testified that Jesse had been at home that morning, but Jesse’s mother later phoned the Florida Department of Corrections to swear that the nude man had pointed a gun at Jesse and forced her son to commit the crimes. And while defense counsel did try to impugn the victims during the trial, the prosecutor wasn’t having it. “This is America, I thought,” prosecutor Edward Carhart told the jury. “I didn’t know we had reached a stage in this country where because someone dances for a living that they are sick in their mind and deserve whatever they get and should be beaten and raped at will.” Both victims took the stand to tell the jury what happened. First up was the young dancer, who testified that Jesse came into the apartment dressed

in a gold jacket and wraparound sunglasses, put a gun to her head, and “told me not to resist and not to put up any fight.” By Mr. Carhart: Q: Did you put up any fight? A: I put up a little until he got serious with the gun. Jesse “started to have sex” with the young woman but she “started shaking and crying and I begged him to stop” and he slapped her in the face and told her that “since I am such a lousy lay, that I would be better giving him head,” she testified. He grabbed her head and she “started pushing him and crying and carrying on, and I got very, very sick at that time” and Jesse hit her again and she fell and he dragged her naked and bound across the floor. Her roommate testified about Jesse too. She told the jury that she was tied to her bed and could hear Jesse assaulting her friend in the living room, and then Jesse came and found her. By Mr. Carhart: Q: What happened in the bedroom? A: And Jessie sat on the bed and he said, “I want you to take care of me.” Q: What happened then? A: And he forced me to suck him. • “Oh God, I remember that case!” Edward Carhart, the retired prosecutor, says. I’ve found him at home in South Miami, in the afternoon. He’s an elegant old man in a wheelchair now, vibrant, sparkling. He’s being generous to me with his time. Carhart didn’t think that case would ever go to trial, he tells me. The reason? The young dancer that Jesse sexually assaulted was rumored to be the girlfriend of Tommy “the Enforcer” Altamura, the bigwig Mafia loan

shark. It was Altamura who finally ended the attack that morning. Because of Altamura, Carhart was convinced that Jesse was doomed. “I felt for sure Tommy Altamura would gather his wits about him and go kill them.” But instead Altamura was shot in the head at A Place for Steak on Halloween, just before Jesse’s trial was due to start. It was one of Miami’s most notorious mob executions. That is what I’m having trouble understanding, I tell Carhart now. Why would anyone break into the apartment of a known mobster’s girlfriend? Was it part of some larger plot against Altamura and his crew? What was Jesse Tafero involved in? Carhart is looking at me with amusement. None of the above, he tells me, when I finally finish my list of possibilities. They broke into the wrong apartment, is what happened. It was all a big mistake. See, the lounge at the Gold Dust used to be a mobster hangout, Carhart says. A Place for Steak, Jilly’s South, they all were. A loose group of people who all kept the same hours and met at the same clubs. A group that was just starting to get into cocaine. These guys weren’t the polished pros who took over the cocaine trade a couple of years later; they weren’t the cartels, the savvy and sophisticated kingpins that made Miami flashy during the Vice years. These were more your liquor-store robbers, your breakingand-entering burglars, a bunch of high school friends who’d stumbled into a high-stakes, high-profit gig. What they lacked in brains they more than made up for in bravado. “One of the hallmarks with this group was they’d kill you out in the Everglades and then they’d blow up your body,” Carhart says. Jesse was on the edges of the group; the leader was drug dealer Ricky Cravero, Carhart tells me. People were afraid of Cravero, with good reason. One time, Cravero and his friends were partying and talking a little too much and they noticed that one of the girls in the room was getting up to leave. They thought she was going to rat them out, so they ran after her and caught her at the elevator and stomped her. There was that Valentine’s Day when they shot their friend Stanley Harris twenty-three times in a parking lot. They’d planned to lure him to a shag-carpeted crash pad and kill him there, but that plan got fucked up when they accidentally snorted all the cocaine they had set aside for bait and the night dissolved into a huge

screaming match that only calmed down when someone got out a machine gun. In the parking lot, after they shot Stanley and he lay bleeding on the pavement, Ricky Cravero kicked him in the face. And then there was the afternoon Cravero’s gang killed a witness who was due to testify against them in court. That murder happened in Burdines, the fancy department store. Something to do with an escalator. The break-in by Jesse and his friend was cocaine-fueled, Carhart says now. No doubt about it. Normal home-invasion robbers do not get naked and spend eleven hours torturing their victims. And when Tommy “the Enforcer” Altamura showed up and tried to break the door down, there was a gunfight, Altamura was shot in the leg, and Jesse and his friend jumped off a second-floor balcony to make their escape. Police found the apartment torn apart and the two women naked, bleeding, bruised, and sobbing. “This was a particularly vicious, vicious group,” Carhart says. • I leave Edward Carhart’s house and walk out into the warm afternoon feeling stunned. The Gold Dust—that was Marianne’s place. Stanley Harris, the Cravero associate who was shot to death—Harris’s home phone records showed Jesse’s number. I’m finding it all a bit difficult to reconcile: pallid Jesse with his dark eyes in the electric chair; the shy, polite, chino-clad Jesse that Marianne remembers; the tragically innocent Jesse of all the recent news stories and The Exonerated; the sexual sadist Jesse of the court testimony; the gangland Jesse of Carhart’s description. In the past, when I’ve thought about Jesse Tafero, I thought he was (a) possibly innocent; (b) guilty but in a wrong-place/wrong-time kind of way; or (c) Clyde. Not reallife Clyde Barrow, but Clyde the charming outlaw as played by Warren Beatty. For twenty-five years, I’ve assumed that the murders were a devastating spur-of-the-moment heartbreak. A cataclysmic catastrophe, not a calculated act. But: drug using, drug dealing, home-invasion robbery, rapes, car bombings, witness stompings, escalator murders. A car full of guns and bullets and cocaine and amphetamines. Stolen passports, a rubber mask, a hatchet.

“Well, when certain people come together, you know, certain things happen. With us it was a bad combination,” Walter Rhodes told me, when I interviewed him in prison. “It’s like when atoms come together.” Or split apart. Maybe it was dark and deliberate, like that. • Sunny also had a criminal history on the morning of the murders, according to the Miami courthouse case files. She was arrested in Miami in November 1968 and charged with prostitution; in December 1970 with possession of marijuana and amphetamines and contributing to the delinquency of a minor—her son, Eric, then age four; in November 1971 with forgery; and in July 1974 with violating South Carolina’s gun laws, possessing marijuana and LSD, and possessing with the intent to distribute amphetamines and barbiturates. On the South Carolina case, Sunny was arrested with an individual who gave his name as Antonio Martes. A copy of the North Myrtle Beach Police Department mugshot of Antonio Martes is in the court records, and the photograph is of Jesse Tafero, who by 1974 had been paroled from his rape and home-invasion robbery conviction, had absconded from parole, and was living life on the run, with Sunny at his side. “I didn’t understand it, but I was going to help him,” Sunny wrote in her book, about the day Jesse told her he was going to jump parole. South Carolina police found two rifles in their van during the traffic stop, and a loaded .25 caliber automatic handgun in Sunny’s purse. She and Jesse didn’t stick around for the trial. The courts tried Sunny Jacobs and Antonio Martes in absentia in September 1974 and found them guilty of the drugs and weapons charges. By early 1976, Jesse had added the names Nevel Carmack and Tony Caruso to his alias list. On the morning of February 20, 1976, when Trooper Black and Constable Irwin happened across the Camaro in the rest area, Jesse had been a fugitive on the run for more than two years. Both Jesse and Sunny refused to give Black any identification or even tell him their names, but if they had, FHP dispatch could have let Trooper Black know about the active warrant out for Jesse’s arrest.

• On Sunny’s 1970 criminal case, the one where she was charged with possession of marijuana and amphetamines and with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, she had a codefendant named William DiCrosta. “Billy,” according to his ex-wife, who at this moment is standing on her front doorstep in Fort Lauderdale, looking at me from under a fringe of blond bangs. Her blue eyes are wary and tired, and it hasn’t helped that I’ve just accidentally smashed a clay pot her sister gave her. Billy is now deceased, she says, but in his heyday he played for the St. Louis Cardinals. A good-looking hotshot with a gambling problem, she says. A story instantly starts to spin in my head about Sunny and some glamorous god of a ballplayer smoking weed back in the day. But when I get back to our bungalow and look it up, I find it was not that. It was a lot more serious. In December 1970, DiCrosta and Sunny were arrested after Sunny was caught on a wiretap negotiating the purchase of a pound of cocaine. In taped conversations with a man by the name of Ivan Hertzendorf, who was under investigation by the Organized Crime Bureau of the Dade County police, Sunny also discussed buying twenty pounds of marijuana and five hundred hits of LSD. On the wiretapped calls, Sunny told Hertzendorf that she’d given her customers a taste of the cocaine and was waiting for further instructions, and then six days later negotiated a purchase price of six thousand dollars for the full pound. Three days after that, and based on the wiretapped calls, police executed a search warrant and arrested DiCrosta and Sunny. Hertzendorf was later convicted on ten counts of narcotics violations. Sunny was described as a “go-between for other customers” and “capable of dealing large quantities of narcotics in a relatively short period of time,” according to the court records. In that 1970 arrest, Sunny had a good lawyer. She was, after all, the daughter of well-to-do textile manufacturers, and the lawyer took her case as a favor to her parents, he later told investigators. She pled to a single charge of possession, with adjudication of guilt withheld, and was sentenced to probation. Her attorney, Harold Rosen, later became mayor of Miami Beach. And on the day in February 1976 when Sunny was arrested

for the murders of Trooper Black and Constable Irwin, her parents talked to another very well-known, high-profile criminal defense attorney about handling her case. Foremost among that attorney’s other clients: Ricky Cravero. “I was representing primarily professional criminals, rather than amateurs,” the attorney, Bill Moran, tells me when I reach him by telephone a few days later. “Ricky was a psychopath. Ricky was a dangerous man, period. You don’t meet a lot of people like that. Ricky Cravero was one of these human beings that if you got involved in a physical altercation with him, the only option you had, other than dying or being beaten to a pulp, was to kill him.” And it wasn’t just Ricky. “It was that whole group of lunatics,” Moran said. “It was like a progressively more disturbing, psychotically violent series of episodes fueled by cocaine abuse. They would just feed on each other’s psychosis. And of course the drugs.” Moran—who would later count among his clients Colombia’s murderous Cali cartel, “source of most of the world’s cocaine,” according to The New York Times, and who in 1998 was convicted of conspiracy to launder money in connection with his work for the cartel—recalls talking on the phone to Sunny’s parents that day in 1976 and then going and trying to find Sunny at the Broward County jail. The jailers claimed they had no idea where Sunny was, Moran says. It was a cat-and-mouse thing. “They were telling me, ‘We don’t know where the person is that we have in custody.’ ” But Moran didn’t end up working on the case. At the time, his clients were coming into his office and dumping garbage bags full of cash onto his desk, he says. “Blinding amounts of money. The money was beyond belief.” He wasn’t inclined to take a pay cut to represent a client facing charges of the first-degree murder of two police officers. He remembers explaining his fees to Sunny’s parents “in that context,” and recalls that they said they understood, but nothing happened after that. In her book, Sunny wrote that Moran came to find her at the jail after getting a call from her old boyfriend John, who was also Jesse’s good friend. Sunny wrote that at the jail Moran told her, “I am, shall we say, the family attorney.” I ask him now about this.

“It wasn’t a family, in the first place,” Moran snaps. He has clearly taken “the family” to mean the mob. “As a general thing, I just don’t need to hear about that shit,” he says. “They were a group of associated people who engaged in joint criminal conduct.” And Sunny Jacobs and Jesse Tafero “were just peripheral figures.” But as he tells me this, he’s pronouncing Jesse’s last name with the emphasis on the first syllable, not the second. Not Ta-FER-o, as everyone in the present day does. TAF-ero, which is how the Tafero family themselves said it. How people who knew Jesse in 1976 say it. “Okay?” Moran says. And hangs up. • The court in Miami has finally produced Walter’s case files from the archives, and I take a seat in a spare cubicle to review the convictions he was on parole for that morning in 1976. When I interviewed Walter in 1990, he explained his prior record to me like this: Me: When you were in before—before this all happened—that was for armed robbery? Walter: Yeah. I used a toy pistol and threw down some people and stole their car. I was stupid, and I was a kid. Me: You used a toy pistol? Where was this? Walter: Miami. Homestead. The guy had his paycheck in his wallet and I gave it back to him. Me: You used a toy pistol, and—what? Walter: I used a toy pistol and I stole the guy’s car. That was one armed robbery. The other armed robbery was, I used that same toy pistol and I robbed a couple of two hundred and something dollars. A toy pistol. I asked him twice. He said it three times. The court file, though—just as in Jesse’s and Sunny’s cases—tells a different story.

In January 1969, when he was eighteen years old, Walter used a “.25 caliber automatic pistol” to carjack a young grocery store clerk in the parking lot of the Dadeland Mall. That pistol is a Saturday night special. A classic stickup gun. Wielding the gun, Walter got into the clerk’s 1958 Corvette and demanded his wallet. “Are you going to kill me?” the clerk asked. “Not right now,” Walter replied. The clerk jumped out of the Corvette and Walter took off in the car “at a high rate of speed.” Walter drove the Corvette to Tijuana, Mexico, and then to San Francisco, ditched it, stole another car, picked up a hitchhiker, and drove back to Miami. There Walter and the hitchhiker invaded the home of an elderly couple who had once rented Walter a room, tied the couple to chairs with electrical cords, ransacked the house, and at gunpoint stole two hundred dollars. The file describes Walter as a “vagrant.” Walter was charged with armed robbery in both cases. “Your honor, the only thing I have to say is that I am guilty, and I have got to pay,” he told the judge. Walter was sentenced to fifteen years and in late 1969 he entered Florida State Prison. There he was soon to meet Jesse, sent up two years earlier for his breaking-and-entering, attemptedrape, and crime-against-nature convictions. So, inside that Camaro at the rest area that morning were an armed robber on parole, a fugitive rapist with some very dangerous friends, and the fugitive’s gun-owning, gun-toting girlfriend, who apparently knew her way around a cocaine deal. It wasn’t just Walter Rhodes who had a motive to kill Trooper Black. All three of them did. • In January 1974, Walter was paroled from Florida State Prison, and in December 1975, he met with his parole officer in Fort Lauderdale to discuss a special request. Walter had been working as a pest exterminator, but now he told his parole officer that he didn’t like the “dangerous chemicals” involved and requested permission to change his profession. The probation officer wrote: “He related that he would be looking for a new position, perhaps in an Escort Service.” Elsewhere in the files, the name of the company itself.

I drive west from the Miami-Dade courthouse, past bodegas and warehouses and trash-littered sidewalks flashing with broken glass. I find the junkyard just as the clock pushes five, its metal gate rumbling shut as I pull up, stacks of rusted metal everywhere. I park and dash up a ramp that runs along the side of the junkyard office building to a doorway at the top. The person I’m looking for here might have been, I’m guessing, Walter Rhodes’s boss. The doorway opens into a warehouse. In its center is a big wood desk. There is a crowd of young men and women standing around the desk, and sitting at it, in an old office chair that tilts back, is Mark. He’s got white hair and is wearing tortoiseshell sunglasses with dark green lenses. He does not take them off. “Never heard of him,” Mark says, when I mention Walter Rhodes. “Your name is on the corporate records for the business he was working for,” I say. “Never heard of it,” Mark says, when I tell him the company’s name. “It was an escort service.” “And I ran it?” Mark says skeptically. He’s getting ready to throw me out, I can tell, and all these nice young people are going to help him. “You and a guy named Peter Blucher,” I add quickly. I have mentioned a magic phrase. Mark laughs uproariously and claps his hands together. “Peter Blucher! I knew Peter Blucher. I lent Peter Blucher money to start a gay escort service!” Mark says. He pauses and looks at me anew. “Why do you want to talk to me about this?” I explain the electric chair malfunction. I say that I hadn’t known much about any of these guys, and now I was finding out that Walter Rhodes was a for-real armed robber and Sunny may have been involved in cocaine dealing and Jesse maybe wasn’t such a nice person either. That I seemed to have wandered into a darker, stranger world than I’d expected. “Yeah, they’re the mob, they all kill each other, going around in a circle,” Mark says. “What other names have you come across?” “Ricky Cravero.” The cocaine mobster arrested with Marianne.